We
are once again indebted to Linda Nelson, of Chicago for
having prepared this book for posting on the Internet. --
The second image below shows (top to bottom) Göring,
Hess, Ribbentrop, Keitel in the dock at Nuremberg (David
Irving: "Nuremberg, the Last Battle"

David Irving reminisces
about working onthe translation of this book ...

IN THE MID-1960s, when I was beginning to work on the
Hitler biography, with no funds to support the task, I had
to take on literary odd jobs to support myself and young
family -- Josephine was born in 1963, her sister Pilar the
year after.

My
publisher William Kimber asked me to draft a report
on the published death-cell memoirs of the chief of the
German high command, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel,
who had been hanged at Nuremberg in October 1946. They were
in German, but I had learned the language at school and as a
steelworker in the Ruhr (1959-60).

The memoirs were unexpectedly solid. I felt they were of
historical importance, as they cast light into areas that
only Keitel could know about; they were written not without
remorse for his role in having allowed himself to be the
co-signatory of some of the war's more questionable
orders.

Kimber offered me a flat fee of £200 to translate
the book; not much money even in those days, but not
chickenfeed either; and not having behind me a father who
made his millions in the Kentucky Fried Chicken business, I
could not sniff at any source of income. In fact my father,
a naval officer who had written for Kimber's his memoirs of
the great naval Battle of Jutland, in which he had fought in
1916, had recently passed away.

Not
really anticipating what an arduous task it is to turn out a
proper, literary, translation of a book (as opposed to the
kind of wooden-wordsludge that a Professor Richard
Evans calls a "translation") I accepted the task, and
many months later I turned in the finished typescript at
Kimber's Knightsbridge offices, in an old building where the
Berkeley Hotel now stands.

The translation was set up in galley proofs -- an
important point -- when Kimber first read it. He noticed
that a lot of stuff seemed to have been left out. There were
ellipses . . . just about everywhere. He asked me to find
out. I contacted the German editor, military historian
Walter Görlitz; he confirmed that some passages
had been left out of the German edition, as they were
considered to be politically incorrect. Stuff like the
entire Battle of Britain and so on. "The British are now our
allies," he explained. This was not good.

"Can we get them back, David?" asked Kimber, pouring more
of his anemic China tea into the delicate porcelain cup he
placed in front of me. "Would the family let us put it all
back in, d'you think?"

I knew that a daughter had married Field Marshal
Werner von Blomberg's son. I located the
field-marshal's son Karl-Heinz Keitel. He was living
outside Cologne, and I arranged to visit him.

The son had been a lieutenant colonel in the army. He was
so delighted that an Englishman -- "the Englishman who wrote
the first book about the
destruction of Dresden" -- was prepared to go the extra
mile and translate the Memoirs of Wilhelm Keitel in full,
with all the "incorrect" stuff put back in, that he did four
favours for me:

He gave me the missing passages of the memoirs, the
original typescript, including all the bad bits crossed
out by the German editors;

He gave me copies of all his father's prison letters
and prison diary at Nuremberg -- which I was able to use
for a much later book, "Nuremberg,
the Last Battle".

He took me into their front room, opened a heavy
oaken cupboard door, poked his hand into the inside ledge
above the door, and brought down the bejeweled, velvet,
platinum-and-gold field-marshal's baton that was hidden
there from the occupation authorities and now from the
German police.

And finally,

He asked, "How would you like to meet Otto
Günsche? He lives just down the road from
here."

GÜNSCHE! He was the loyal adjutant and
Sturmbannführer who had been with Adolf
Hitler in the Berlin bunker until the very last moment,
and had carried out what he told me was the hardest order of
his life: bearing the lifeless body of Eva Braun up
the winding staircase into the Chancellery Garden on the
afternoon of April 30, 1945, and then slopping gasoline over
her body and that of Hitler, and tossing a flaming torch
onto them.

He spent the next ten years in Soviet gulags, and he is
still alive today; he had never spoken to anybody about
those times.

"Otto -- this is David Irving. He wrote the book on
Dresden." That was the introduction. He added that I was
translating the field marshal's memoirs, in full, for the
English. Günsche sat down and talked briefly, and a few
days later he talked again for several hours into my tape
recorder. I still have the reels of tape; or rather I had
them until they were seized by the British authorities along
with all my other possessions last May (2002). We shall now
fight to get them back. But I digress.

The Keitel Memoirs were published, and eventually
I received my translator's fee. When I looked at the cheque
from Kimber's it was not however for £200; it was
£67 (around $100 now), as payment for some three
months' work. Not much money, even in 1966.

"Author's corrections," said Kimber with his bland,
oh-so-English smile. He tapped the translation contract:
see, the author is liable for all the costs for "author's
corrections" amounting to over ten percent of the printing
bill. Because of the substantial late "author's corrections"
at galley-proof stage, -- namely the restoration of the
missing passages at Kimber's request -- the setting bill had
been increased by, yes, around £130.

On
that basis, I was lucky, I suppose, to have received
anything for my work at all, and not to have been presented
with a bill at the end of the job.

To him it was almost a game. Of course, as the English
say, it is not who wins that matters, it is how you play the
game.

There were two by-products of this unfortunate
incident.

As I left, I gently plucked off Kimber's desk the
completed, bound, typescript of my next book The Knight's
Move (later published in 1967 as The
Destruction of Convoy PQ.17) and flounced out of his
Knightsbridge office saying I did not intend to be "cheated"
a second time.

He sent his secretary Amy Howlett running out into
Wilton Place after me, pleading for me to return the new
manuscript. I stayed firm, and transferred the PQ.17 book to
Cassell & Co Ltd: Cassell's and I were subsequently, in
1967, sued for the libel which Captain Jack
E Broome, RN, alleged it contained: and we had
damages and costs awarded against us amounting to a quarter
of a million pounds or more in 1970. It nearly bankrupted
the company, and did little to prosper my family's finances
either.

THE second by-product of the Keitel job was a hidden and
unexpected bonus. After we met, Günsche gradually
introduced me to the Inner Circle of Hitler's staff and
officers; most of them were still alive at that time and
intensely private people, who had never spoken to writers
about what they knew: I was the Englishman who had written
that book about Dresden, said Günsche; and I was the
one who had gone the extra mile for the late field marshal's
memoirs.